First Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT)

NAACL HLT 2010 Workshop
June 5, 2010, Los Angeles, CA

Call for Papers

Assistive technology (AT) supports individuals with disabilities in participating in activities that would otherwise be difficult or impossible for them. An obvious and ubiquitous example is a wheelchair, which assists with mobility. AT follows the principles of universal design, permitting access by persons with and without disabilities to make tasks simpler and more intuitive, more flexible and equitable in use, with lower physical effort and higher tolerance for errors. An important and visible category within the AT community is known as Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC), which is focused on multi-modal communication, including technologies for those who cannot rely on natural speech and/or writing as the primary means of expression. From providing access to web-based communication for individuals with severe motor impairments, to improving the intelligibility of output in speech generating devices, the range of AAC topics that could or should rely on speech and natural language processing (NLP) technologies is very large. Yet the number of individuals actively working within the two research communities – AT/AAC on the one hand and speech/NLP on the other – is relatively small. This workshop will bring individuals from both of these research communities together with AAC users to share research findings, and to discuss present and future challenges and the potential for collaboration and progress.

While AAC is a particularly apt application area for speech and NLP technologies, we are purposefully making the scope of the workshop broad enough to include assistive technologies as a whole, even those falling outside of AAC. Topics that are appropriate for the workshop yet fall outside of the scope of AAC would include things such as spoken language or dialogue interfaces to assistive devices, or other related topics in Human Computer Interaction. While we will encourage work that validates the methods with human experimental trials, we will also consider work on basic-level innovations, inspired by AT/AAC related problems. Thus we are aiming for a broad inclusivity, which is also manifest in the diversity of our Program Committee.

Topics of interest for submission to the workshop include (but are not limited to):

• Speech and NLP applied to typing interface applications
• Brain-computer interfaces for language processing applications
• Automated processing of sign language
• Speech transformation for improved intelligibility
• Novel modeling and machine learning approaches for AAC applications
• Text processing for improved comprehension, e.g., sentence simplification or text-to-speech
• Dialogue systems and natural language generation for assistive technologies
• NLP for cognitive assistance applications
• Speech, natural language and multimodal interfaces to assistive technologies
• Assessment of speech and language processing within the context of assistive technology
• Deployment of speech and NLP tools in the clinic or in the field
• Other topics in Augmentative and Alternative Communication

Organizers

• Melanie Fried-Oken (Oregon Health & Science University)
• Kathleen F. McCoy (University of Delaware)
• Brian Roark (Oregon Health & Science University)

Program Committee

• Norman Alm, University of Dundee
• Jean-Yves Antoine, Université François-Rabelais
• John Arnott, University of Dundee
• Bruce Baker, Semantic Compaction Systems
• Melanie Baljko, York University, Canada
• Jan Bedrosian, Western Michigan University
• Jeff Bilmes, University of Washington
• Tim Bunnell, University of Delaware
• Ann Copestake, University of Cambridge
• Alistair D.N. Edwards, University of York
• Michael Elhadad, Ben-Gurion University
• Leo Ferres, Universidad de Concepción, Chile, & Carleton University, Canada
• Jeff Higginbotham, University of Buffalo
• Graeme Hirst, University of Toronto
• Linda Hoag, Kansas State University
• Matt Huenerfauth, CUNY
• Alexander Kain, Oregon Health & Science University
• Heidi Koester, Koester Performance Research
• Richard E. Ladner, University of Washington
• Greg Lesher, Dynavox Technologies, Inc.
• Yael Netzer, Ben-Gurion University
• Alan Newell, University of Dundee
• Rupal Patel, Northeastern University
• Helen Petrie, University of York
• Ehud Reiter, University of Aberdeen
• Howard Shane, Children's Hospital Boston
• Fraser Shein, Bloorview Kids Rehab, Canada
• Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii, University of Tokyo
• Annalu Waller, University of Dundee
• Tonio Wandmacher, Commissariat á l'énergie atomique, France
• David Wilkins, Language and Linguistics Consulting, Australia

Important Dates

Paper Submission deadline: March 1, 2010   (passed)
Notification to authors: March 30, 2010   (passed)
Workshop: June 5, 2010

Submission

Submissions are now closed

Papers will be accepted on or before March 1, 2010 in PDF or Postscript formats via the START system, which you can access at:
https://www.softconf.com/naaclhlt2010/assistive/

Submissions should follow the NAACL HLT 2010 length and formatting requirements for full papers of eight (8) pages of content with one (1) extra page for references, found at http://naaclhlt2010.isi.edu/authors.html. Note that this is a double-blind review process, hence identifying information must be omitted from submitted papers, as specified in the NAACL HLT formatting requirements.

Contact

Please send inquiries to slpat2010.workshop@gmail.com.

Last updated: April 4, 2010